Buffy and Dr. Varnus 139
Here's an Internet riddle:
What do fans of "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" and Dr. Harold E. Varmus, the director of the National Institutes of Health, have in common?
Both are unlikely social revolutionaries.
Both are, in wildly divergent ways, showing us how almost everything we understand about information -- who makes it, shares it, sees it, owns it - is changing.
Both are hailed as heroes by some and seen by others as impulsive, impatient and irresponsible.
For nearly all of human history, information has been a valuable commodity and a political tool. It has always been controlled by powerful elites who have been willing to fight, even kill for it. Centuries ago, the guardians of information were referred to as The Holy Circle.
Last week, it was the WB's turn to learn what the music industry and Wall Street now know: the Net is changing the rules. Now it's the medical researchers turn.
The worst nightmare of the people who control information is, of course, the Net. Many millions of individuals connected to much of the information in the world. And it turns out that their worst nightmares about the Net are becoming truer by the day. Last week, "Buffy" fans used the Net to distribute tapes and transcripts of the show's season finale, postponed by the show's craven blockhead producers in the post-Littleton hysteria (maybe George Lucas ought to yank "Phantom Menace" - Anikin does plenty of Federation and droid-bashing).
Tuesday, it was a government official, Dr. Varmus, who proposed another radical step towards democratizing information by proposing to Congress that the NIH launch E-biomed, an electronic publishing operation that would be part of the NIH's website and that would permit scientists and researchers to disclose and disseminate the results of biomedical research on the Internet, making the full texts of their reports available for the first time to anyone with a computer anywhere in the world.
Dr. Varmus? proposal touched off a furious debate among medical journalists and researchers. The editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, which has 240,000 paid subscribers, said "E-biomed could have a disastrous effect on clinical journals." He said subscribers would have no reason to subscribe to magazines like his - many of which cost thousands of dollars - if they could get the contents of journals free on the Internet.
But Dr. Varnus gets the Net, it's inevitabile growth and and potential for freeing up previously unavailable information. Journals can find other ways to generate funds, he told The New York Times. Societies, he said, "should not be seen as slowing a revolution in publishing that could make all journals more accessible."
Good for Dr. Varnus. One wonders how he ever got so far up the scientific and governmental food chain. His vision is far more intelligent and power than any advanced by any newspaper editor, music industry executive, TV producer or most government officials over the past few ears.
The E-biomed debate quickly took on a familiar ring. Researchers were bitterly divided about Dr. Varnus? proposal. One University of Wisconsin professor called it "among the very worst ideas I've ever heard," saying all sorts of unsubstantiated junk could be posted on the NIH website without the traditional, sometimes laborious process of peer and editorial review.
But Dr. Varnus said the new website would include some form of scientific screening and review. He said the site would have two components. Articles published in the first compartment would be subject to scientific review by members of the editorial boards of various journals. Another component would permit the immediate posting of medical research on the Net, prior to any formal peer review. Medical and scientific research could be greatly accelerated, he hoped.
Varnus said that for work to be disseminated in this way, researchers would need approval from two individuals with appropriate credentials. These credentials, he said, would be broad enough to include several thousands of scientists, but stringent enough to provide protection of the data base from extraneous or outrageous material. He said E-biomed would be a general repository of medical research where virtually any legitimate work could be posted for anyone in the world to see, from researchers to patients to ordinary citizens - the ones footing the bill for most, if not all, of the NIH's funded research.
Varnus hopes E-biomed will not only give the public access to medical information previously available only to medical professions, but that it will also accelerate its dissemination to the world. Many elites, from media to medicine to lawyers, have always argued the public is too wanton or dumb to handle so much information. They needed interpreters - like them. But the Net is proving them wrong. All sorts of information is available online that wasn't available at all a few years ago, and society seems to be holding together.
E-biomed would, Varnus said, offer instant, free access the latest reports on biology and medicine, saving money for individual scientists, libraries, labs, and Government agencies.
Physicists and mathematicians already can instantly post many of their findings, prior to publication in a journal, on a Web site operated by the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico (http://www.xxx.lanl.gov). But some doctors opposed to E-biomed say biomedical research, especially clinical research, is different because it can influence care of patients.
As with the rest of society, it's striking to see just how divided professionals are about this encroachment of the Net and the Web into the turf of powerful enclaves like medicine.
While many American doctors and medical journalists said they were unhappy about E-biomed, an Australian researcher drew an analogy to the spread of literacy and printing in medieval Europe centuries ago. "Were all books going to be authoritative and accurate? Were some dangerous to society? We can imagine priests saying, "Mass printing and wide dissemination of books is O.K. so long as we insure that every book is approved by a priest review process."
If he lived in America, he wouldn't have to imagine that. That's more or less the idea most members of Congress have about how the Net and Web ought to work. That's why they passed not one, but two Communications Decency Acts.
Information visionaries like Dr. Varnus - people who can see beyond the understandable anxiety but sometimes outrageous mis-information and rhetoric - have been few and far between, especially in powerful, mainstream institutions.
It's hard to get your head around an information revolution in which the fans of "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" and the head of the National Institutes of Health are making a seminal point much of society still doesn't really want to hear. That would be this: the Holy Circle of interests and institutions that has controlled information for most, if not all, of human history, is going to have to share.
Slow journals (Score:1)
--josh daghlian
--lehigh university
There are at least three separate issues (Score:1)
I think we've conflated three distinct issues, and that we'd benefit from separating them:
- The process by which information is generated and its quality is assessed - peer review, free-for-all, etc.
- The mechanism and medium by which information is distributed - paper, www, etc.
- The economic model by which information is distributed - for free, by subscription, per-use, etc.
The three are orthogonal; one can imagine migrating from today's (peer-reviewed, paper, subscription) system to, for instance, a (peer-reviewed, www, subscription) system -- which no doubt the Old Guard would applaud. Stanford's Highwire Press [stanford.edu] is an interesting effort to deploy a (peer-reviewed, www, hybrid) system which has also met with the approval of many Old Guard journals.Quality control becomes a problem with all (free-for-all, *, *) systems. (I disagree with (#41) that "it's about time to shake up the peer review system." Peer review is a great way to assure quality, addressing the questions raised eloquently in (#35, 54, etc.). "Non-elites" may clamor for "democratic" publishing, but Usenet illustrates its impact on quality.)
Similarly, publisher resistance may become a problem with all (*, *, free) systems. Archiving is a concern with (*, www, *). And so on.
By treating each of these three issues separately we can draw useful distinctions, e.g., there are at least two, very different Old Guards:
- for-profit publishers (e.g. Reed Elsevier [elsevier.com]) who want to preserve (peer-reviewed, paper, subscription) because it's profitable [reed-elsevier.com]
- non-profit publishers (e.g. AAAS [aaas.org]) who can accept (peer-reviewed, *, *) because they are driven by the professional demands of their members. [aaas.org]
BTW, Katz, you spelled Dr. Varmus' [nih.gov] name correctly 3 times and misspelled it "Varnus" 8 times. Misspelling is bad enough, but internal inconsistency...? But an interesting article nonetheless. Bring on Buffy.Science Journals a sham... (Score:1)
About 2 years ago, I proposed to a friend, a bio-researcher, that she publish her results independently of these cherrished Journals who, just want you to submit your paper for peer review so they can block your results from acknowledgement for 6 to 10 months while the pass your paper around to their cronies who duplicate the work, crank out their own papers who, oddly enough get short-circuited thought the review process (well, mr. so-and-so from princeton, this experment's results are exactly the same as a paper we've been reviewing for the last 10 months, put together by an undergrad; due to the depth of your conclusions and the number of initials after your name, we're going to publish you and conviently lose the undergrad's paper).
The entire process smells of managed and marketed least publishable differences brokered by who you know, what people think of your title and who's good ideas are made available for ripping off.
I tried to convince my this friend that there was NOTHING wrong with openly publishing results, but the quarterly peer review, we protect you intellectual property brainwashing lecture that Stanford gives to all their reasearchers had her convinced that it was a bad idea. The best argument she could muster was that peer review and repsected journals keept the reasearch noise factor to a minimum.
I guess after 10 years of gleening gems from the steaming pile of crap that is the internet (web, usenet, mailing lists, and all), I just couldn't see her point.
As for research done at academic institutions, I have completely lost respect for the entire process. It's too rift with politics and money to be of use to actual scientists headed down the true path of discovery. Today's successful scientist is a political business hound first, hack scientist with the appropriate paperwork degrees second.
These journals are firghtened of the internet, just like the printing press scared the hell out of the church and fudal lords. And given what these journals have been doing to (not for) good reasearchers over the years, they should be.
Re:Information - Free is ok, but save the Quality! (Score:1)
2nd and 3rd and nth tier journals are easier to publish in, and therefore aren't as influential. Nearly all journals are available on-line in some form or another (abstracts to full text articles), usually for an institutional fee. Perhaps HMO's should offer such access to their members.
To remove all financial support from journals simply removes their fundamental purpose, to review and report meaningful data. It's like the claim that new books published as e-texts should be super cheap since their is no cost for production/shipping, etc. The price also has to cover the people: the writer, editor, etc.
And no, this isn't at all like Buffy...
XXX.lanl.gov (Score:1)
Dr. Varmus (Score:1)
I think what Dr Varmus is doing is great. As another poster said, I can't believe the scientific community is against it. They sound more interested in making money than the sharing of scientific knowledge, which to me is what science is all about...knowledge.
I used to work with Dr. Varmus when he was at UCSF (nothing more than a lab assistant) but he was always a wonderful person to work with. After he won the nobel prize (shared) and got hist post with the NIH he took the whole lab out to a great party/dinner. I'm not really surprised he would be pushing for this. He always tried to go beyond what the administrations told him he could and couldn't do, always for the better of the science.
----
"Wars, conflict, it's all business. One murder makes a
villain. Millions a hero. Numbers sanctify."
Re:Information - Free is ok, but save the Quality! (Score:1)
To remove all financial support from journals simply removes their fundamental purpose, to review and report meaningful data. It's like the claim that new books published as e-texts should be super cheap since their is no cost for production/shipping, etc. The price also has to cover the people: the writer, editor, etc.
It may not remove all financial support for the journals. While any publication costs money to create, you *can* cut down the costs by cutting out the printing and distribution costs.
No researcher would argue that scientific evidence shouldn't be available. What they (and I) are concerned about is the ease with which the peer review process could be undermined. The reason the big name journals (JAMA, etc.) are so influential is precisely because all submissions undergo a critical scrutiny.
As you said, there are many levels of journals out there. An online journal will either be dismissed by current journal subscribers as not up to the level of the current journals, or it will be judged to offer similar quality for a lot less money. It's called competition. It's what keeps certain providers from charging exhorbitant fees. Perhaps it was time for this to happen to the medical journals as well.
Where do many of the researchers get most of their money anyway? From taxpayers. Why then should taxpayers have to pay thousands of dollars for access to the results of their contributions? I understand that the information underwent a great deal of scrutiny. So does free software. What's your point?
Re:Get real how hard is it to press a CD including (Score:1)
appropriate viewers for what OS? for what hardware? he's talking really long term. Not just 5 or 10 years down the road. Basically they need to store everything and continually update the archive by converting the whole thing to a newer format when necessary.
Re:Just nuke the journals? Maybe not. (Score:1)
Archiving of information has been a problem since the beginning of mankind. Even when information has literally been carved in stone, reading it has been a challenge.
All things considered, I would think that in 50 years, we would be more successful at building a CD-ROM drive than in getting at journals printed on paper or microfiche. The bulk of the media and the difficulty of storing it safely are a big factor. The other is retrieval. Information is being cranked out faster every day. Imagine trying to find a single article in a climate controlled warehouse containing 50 years of publications.
One of the best ways to preserve information is massive redundancy. Make sure that MANY people have a copy of the information in a convieniant form. Compare how many people might store a stack of 10 CDs vs. the equivilant in paper journals.
As a practical example, The BBC lost most of the early episodes of Dr Who due to media decay. The episodes are available today because of hardcore fans who had recorded the episodes (using professional equipment since the VCR was not available then).
Re:Public education. (Score:1)
For the most part, snake oil remedies based on preliminary or misinterpreted research seem to be attributable more to advertising and sellers than consumers directly reading the research. Most of the consumers who would fall for that would probably find research papers too dry and complex to bother with.
We'd be better off widely publishing the research and banning the pharmaceutical commercials that can all be summarized as 'pester the $*it out of your doctor about this new medication that has nothing to do with your medical condition, side effects include death to you and your entire neighborhood and in a small percentage of cases global thermonuclear war...May also cause the disease it's supposed to cure'.
Re:Wow! No longer need CLUELESS Journalists (Score:1)
Try your local public library. Most subscribe to either Science or Nature.
Re:To hell wit' Buffy... (Score:1)
I'm gonna have to 2nd this.
Willow rocks!
nuff said,
Tim
Katz does good (Score:1)
However, the research community has traditionally been one of the most elitist. While in principle, it subscribes to open ideas (all experimental findings and methods should be available), there is a great deal of effort spent, it seems, on making this information difficult to get a hold of.
It's harder than you imply... (Score:1)
(Yes, I know about simulators, but it's still not like rolling off a log.)
Re:Just nuke the journals? Maybe not. -- follow-up (Score:1)
a) Yes, we can burn CD's with the data and the viewers. Why bother? What OS is going to run those viewers in even five years, let alone fifty? How much software broke going from Linux 2.0 to 2.2?
b) For that matter, who's going to have a CD-ROM drive in ten years? Not ten feet from me is a room packed with 200MB tapes written to by a PDP that we can't read anymore, because you simply can't buy a compatible tape drive anymore.
c) If you think ASCII is a solution, talk to someone who doesn't write in English. ASCII is very, very limited. What's the code for the integration symbol? We could just use little JPEGs (which is hardly a standard that I'd bet on being around in fifteen years) for all those special characters, but then our document size blows up, in addition to now needing precise layout capabilities which ASCII text doesn't provide.
Now, all these problems have solutions, and the solutions are worth finding, because complete on-line access to scientific research would be a wonderful thing. What I'm concerened about is that the solutions be found before the journals all fold up. We don't need another Y2K-esque poor planning disaster on our hands.
Re:Just nuke the journals? Maybe not. (Score:1)
Besides, "the dawn of the internet" is a very small time compared to the amount of time we need to keep documents around for. And even on simple text, there's been no established standard. Think of all those poor IBM mainframe people with their EBCDIC documents.
Should be available. (Score:1)
Re:Whom do you trust? (Score:1)
Re:Just nuke the journals? Maybe not. (Score:1)
It's already just about impossible to find anyone that can read data storage media that was common in the 1970s, such as 7-track tape.
When new media is introduced, it is common for new drives to read the previous generation media, such as DVD-ROM drives reading CD-ROM discs. But 50 years from now we will proabably have gone through at least three more generations of optical discs (or perhaps switched to an entirely different storage technology), so assuming that drives capable of reading CD-ROMs will still be readily available is very risky.
It is interesting to note, however, that when the CD data format was devised in the late 70s and early 80s, it was deliberately designed to be very simple to read, so that players would be inexpensive. The format is so simple, in fact, that players could be built without microprocessors. However, by the time the CD was introduced in 1983, microprocessers had become so inexpensive that AFAIK no microprocessorless players were ever marketed.
So even if CD-ROM drives aren't readily available 50 years from now, if someone is desperate enough to read one, it should be possible to build one. It seems like something a small team of graduate students could accomplish in less than a year (remember, they are assumed to have no existing CD hardware to work from).
Re:Just nuke the journals? Maybe not. (Score:1)
Paper lasts >100 years easily. If you go to the trouble of using acid-free paper, it lasts even longer.
On the one hand, it's important to have research results available in a convenient form today. But on the other hand, it still needs to be available many years into the future.
Re:Just nuke the journals? Maybe not. (Score:1)
It may seem obvious that a reasonable person would copy the data to new media every so often. But in reality, there's too much data to be copied, and the problem always seems like it can be pushed off to tomorrow. By the time tomorrow arrives, it's too late.
If you don't believe me, talk to any archivist. It's a difficult and thankless task.
Re:What Is It With TV? (Score:1)
Try, people's access to a bunch of advertising hype and trash. TV quit transmitting "information" long ago...
> You increase someone's freedom when you give that person more options to choose from.
You increase someone's freedom by teaching them to think, not sit and vegitate in front of the boob tube.
> You can rank the intelligence of sentient beings by their ability to predict future events based on their grasp on past and present.
What does predicting the future have to do with canned laugh tracks and endless streams of crude jokes and "bathroom humor"?
I'm all for freedom and the Net, but equating the current crop of TV shows to freedom is nothing short of laughable!
Peer Review with Trust Ratings == PGP Signatures (Score:1)
All that is needed is to have a mechanism for reviewers to attach a digital signature to an article and another mechanism to alow viewers to rate the trustability of the reviewer by means examining the reviewer's history of article reviews and academic qualifications with the same trust network that PGP uses for evaluating signature keys.
Re: Dr. Baltimore? (Score:1)
I must've been out of touch. I've never heard of this case - could you expound on it?
Leilah
Re:How about a little QC here, Katz? (Score:1)
Re:Just nuke the journals? Maybe not. -- follow-up (Score:1)
Now, granted, I would expect real problems reading ancient versions of Word. But HTML documents and JPEG files are going to be around for a long time to come, and today's browsers can still read HTML from the dawn of the web. In fact, they can even read GOPHER documents and FTP sites, which are
For as long as Unix and Unix-compatible systems last - and I think that will be a very long time - TeX documents will still be readable. So if you need to typeset math stuff, TeX is going to be pretty good for you. And if my memory serves, it's not difficult to learn their equation formatting system. If and when Unix dies, TeX will no doubt be moved to the new platforms. Remember, even Windows NT is Posix-based.
Word, though - since Microsoft invalidates old versions of the format with each new one, I think it would be a very bad idea to count on Word documents remaining compatible. But the "open" formats like HTML and TeX should have a more or less permanent life. Store them on good quality floppies, and I see hope for an unlimited lifespan, as long as you copy the data to new disks every once in a while.
D
----
Better... (Score:1)
I see that Katz still needs a proofreader, though.
gets the Net, it's inevitabile growth and and potential
s/it's/its/
s/inevitabile/inevitable/
s/and and/and/
All in one line.
And of course the dreaded "?" for a Micros~1 dumb, er... smart quote.
--
Re:Just nuke the journals? Maybe not. (Score:1)
The problem is archiving. Ten, twenty, one hundred years down the line, we still need to be able to get at the document. Computers aren't good at that. (...) Opening a document that was created even two years ago can be an adventure -- imagine what that will be like in a century.
This is a very important point, and something that makes me nervous about the current trends in 'full text online' journal websites. My student subscription to the Biophysical Journal, to take an example, includes password access to the full text of the journal. Very nice, but I can't exactly cite it since it's not open access and may disappear (or re-arrange) at any time. I don't even get a CD out of the deal.
There are two obvious ways to approach this. Printing paper copies has already been mentioned, and this is certainly a good idea. The other is just to budget for data migration. University libraries and the publishing organization should both take responsibility for this. One has to plan on migrating data to new media once a decade anyway, and that might be a good time to translate the data format as well. I think the comment about two year old documents is a little specious. This is true of proprietary data formats, but not widely adopted open ones. It gets harder the older the format is, but the time constant is a little more manageable. Four year old html is still perfectly readable, and so is 10 year old TeX, to pick a more challenging example. Storing all that paper takes resources; data is no different.
Open distribution licenses would immediately help with alot of this as well. I think that's the only way citation of online resources would ever work--as some kind of meta-reference into a distributed archive, much like the eprint system now provides ( gr-qc/9905084 [lanl.gov]). I've always found it rediculous that journals expect me to sign over the copyright to the articles I write.
Whatever happened to a review system for the eprint archives [lanl.gov] anyway?
Re:Why Did This Have To Be Another Katz Soapbox? (Score:1)
Point the second, your links aren't links, they're just bold words.
Re:Slow journals (Score:1)
Also, some journals allow online access if you subscribe.
Either way, it is very convinient and much easier to search
and catalog. I honestly thought all fields of research did this.
But I am against a web site for publishing non-peer-reviewed
articles. That's what your private web-sites are for.
Re:To hell wit' Buffy... (Score:1)
Re: firm grasp on the obvious (Score:1)
TV was created to sell advertising. (of mostly consumable, or dare i say disposable things) Disposability does not make a thing bad. infact, many disposable things have value, and their intrinsically disposable nature creates this value... lighters, diapers, contact lenses, feminine hygiene products, etc... wonderful things they are, but ultimately it all ends up in a landfill.
xoxo,
freq
firm grasp on the obvious (Score:1)
well... actually i dont see the parallel... maybe i should put on my glasses.
of course those ultra smug and ever brilliant guys with the big paychecks in the medical journal world are scared. trying to figure out how to protect their sinking ship like any other traditional business that relies on print distribution. (or non-digital distribution)
they may claim that they are defending their traditional channels of peer review and protecting the integrity of the information, but they are really just trying to cover their assez.
obviously somebody has to stand up and suggest something like this to their little community. its happened everywhere else...
we've heard it all before. another nail in the coffin of traditional print culture. score another one for free information.
--freq
Re:Katz does good, almost (Score:1)
One problem, though. You rely heavily on yesterday's new york times article on the subject, but you are very slacking in quoting your sources. Please be a little more professional in the future so your readers are clear where the information is coming from. I am referring to the quote about the spread of literacy, mainly. for shame.
-jason
To hell wit' Buffy... (Score:1)
Yeehah!!
Sure, I watch it regularly, this past year anyway. I live in Toronto and taped the big Season Finale because I was out that night.
I didn't even watch it until 2 days ago.
All the morons who can't wait a month or two to see a TV show really gotta get their
priorities straight.
Jeez, I still haven't even seen the big finale of ST:TNG and that was years ago!
Whatever,
Pope
Australia does have censorship (Score:1)
Don't worry, Australia has recently created an even more draconian censorship bill. :-(
--
Moodle - Open source software for online education - http://moodle.com/ [moodle.com]
Re:Get real how hard is it to press a CD including (Score:1)
Re:Just nuke the journals? Maybe not. (Score:1)
Re:Just nuke the journals? Maybe not. (Score:1)
Re:Just nuke the journals? Maybe not. (Score:1)
Re:Information/Open Source Biomed (Score:1)
To a more informed populace!
Re:Just nuke the journals? Maybe not. (Score:1)
Re:Just nuke the journals? Maybe not. (Score:1)
>problems. (For most people, journals are freely
>accessible, if not convenient: it's just a
>matter of finding the closest university
>library.)
That may be the case in America, in cities.
Here in Ireland, however, I have no personal access to that kind of library,
except through friendly students who might photocopy stuff for me.
My father, living 80 miles away in the country, knows few enough students,
and is not even close to that standard of library.
He has 'net access, though, and E-biomed would be accessible immediately.
I take your point on archiving, though...
Re:People will always be subject to ignorance. (Score:1)
Education is not a priviledge, it is a necessity for modern existance.
Crypt.X
How about a little QC here, Katz? (Score:1)
The thinking behind the article *may* be valid, but sloppiness like this kept me from reading far enough to know.
Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed that the quality of
Re:What Is It With Buffy? (Score:1)
You increase someone's freedom when you give that person more options to choose from.
You can rank the intelligence of sentient beings by their ability to predict future events based on their grasp on past and present.
Pirating a TV show means nothing in itself.
But using the fact that this TV show was pirated at this point in time and the fact that some people in a traditionally closed circle want to disseminate medical information at this point in time to show a trend and alert other people to what MAY happen is doing something to increase liberty.
Because, when you make other people aware of what is going on BEFORE it is finished, you give them the option to choose to go with or against the flow.
And this is what freedom is all about.
Re:Jon, did you notice... (Score:1)
Of course, this would lead to more people being cited in research. While this would be a good thing for the community at large, it would be bad for glory hounds (there are many in medical research) and for "publish or perish" professors.
It would also be important to restrict who could post. Perhaps only licensed MDs? You wouldn't want the chaff level to get too high as quacks ("What about my miracle powder?") and crazies ("The voices in my head recommend this approach") chimed in on preliminary research.
Why replace the screen? (Score:1)
I could understand if it was a non-OCR'd scan it would look very bad on current screens. One thing. It's very important to keep out Orwellian wannabes. Read-Only media.
Besides, by using ASCII-HTML you can get it to do all you want. What I'm very encouraged about is that a 680MB CD-ROM will hold a lot of non animated material. And what do the buggers cost? Hardly $2 for an encyclopedia sized CD. Plus who's stopping the journal organizations from selling archives to schools, to industries, to freaking individuals.
Get real how hard is it to press a CD including... (Score:1)
Re:Whom do you trust? (Score:1)
Re:firm grasp on the obvious (Score:1)
> support for disposable culture, and defense of
> the time honored tradition of peer review in the > medical research world.
>
> well... actually i dont see the parallel...
> maybe i should put on my glasses.
Both concern the freedom of information and the use of the Internet to circumvent the normal means to restrict the flow of it. While you may not have a high opinion of the information in question, the theme is apparent.
Personally, as I get older I grow more and more tired of the snobbery which people use as some sort of lame ego defense and which involves denigrating any aesthetic product which doesn't appeal to their subjective tastes. This is one of the reasons I have always liked Paglia. Though I don't always agree with what she calls beautiful, she is not afraid to see the worthwhile and valuable in a thing regardless of its medium. Just because something is part of popular culture doesn't mean it is worthless and those people who enjoy it or find it important ignorant and misguided. Honestly, there is absolutely no difference between this snobbery and more unacceptable forms of discrimination, like racism and sexism.
Eric Berg
Re:Public education. (Score:1)
I think it is awesome to have research so openly available to the public. In effect, it's open-sourcing, and the benefits to society will parallel that thought. Instantly your community of reviewers is dramatically increased, and who knows what avenues of exploration that may have been ignored by the smaller community will be exposed by the opinions of millions. No doubt there will be public forums devoted to discussion of the latest research, and the more minds involved the better! Granted there will be plenty of erroneous ideas thrown around, and the benefit is like the open source response to bug announcements, that these misconceptions will be able to be patched more quickly. And thus the more questions asked the better in order to depose myths and promote common sense.
Re:Katz = Dvorak (Score:1)
please. calm down. lay off the coffee. take a pill or something. katz is fine. you, however, are overblown in your criticism of him.
thou dost protest too much, methinks.
Re:Information/Open Source Biomed (Score:1)
I agree with you there - when I go to the doctor and tell him "Yeah, I get an infection, so I take erythromyicin (sp) for it... Who prescribed it? I bought it down in Mexico!" - I get a very strange, mean look...
I have to wonder.... (Score:1)
The medical traditon seems to me compelled to deny information to the average person. Try having a look at your own chart in a hospital tome time. Medical records on your own body are not considered your own property and you are often denied access to them.
I applaud the idea of research information being widely diseminated this way.
Re:What Is It With Buffy? (Score:1)
Sometimes the information is shit and you're better off without it (this decision, of course, belonging to the individual).
You increase someone's freedom when you give that person more options to choose from.
Destroying your TV gives you back the time you spent watching it - and that opens up options as to what to do with that time.
Therefore, a hammer through the boob tube can increase your freedom. QED.
Re:Why replace the screen? (Score:1)
And if you really want a screen to act like paper, there are new cholesterol-based mono screens coming out that are supposed to actually look and act like paper. But until then, I'm much happier reading text on my plain old 17" monitor.
Minor correction (Score:1)
Re:What Is It With TV? (Score:1)
Sounds like slashdot (Score:1)
Anyone can post almost anything, but the gems are reviewed by, say, people with serious credentials selected at random.
Further, (potentially at least) the good stuff is given higher scores to let it filter to the top...
CmdrTaco oughta email Dr V. this URL... or did he already model his idea on slashdot, but with a bit more seriousness? Not that slashdot's not a serious publication.
Re:What Is It With Buffy? (Score:1)
Re:Why Did This Have To Be Another Katz Soapbox? (Score:1)
Point the second... They are not meant to be real links. That's why it's an example, not an article. I don't know where the transcript of Dr.
Varnus' statements is.
Point the third... don't let your knee-jerk Katz defensive reaction kick you in your own a$$.
Re:Katz = Dvorak -- Good Riddance (Score:1)
If only it were that simple. The problem is that the /. community is represented to the world at large by someone who is not even capable of installing RedHat without help.
Would you let Adam Sandler handle American foreign policy? Would you let Heidi Fleiss deliver ex cathedra statements from the Vatican? Would you let Jim Brady represent the U.S. in the Olympic 100-meter dash? (hee hee) If the answer is "no", then why let Katz represent us to the unwashed?
I say that every filtering out should be accompanied by an e-mail to /.
The community should speak out against representation without consultation, etc.
Value of Peer Review (Score:1)
scientific knowledge. In today's world, researchers don't have the
time to personally verify data published by others which is relevant
to their own work. 100 years ago, this wasn't a problem - if someone
wrote a paper discussing a new facet of the electromotive principle,
one could verify it with a small expenditure of time and resources.
Today in the world of high energy physics, when the D0 collaboration
at Fermilab publishes a paper with a new W mass measurement, I want to
be able to take that number and plug it into my calculations with a
certain degree of confidence in its accuracy. I can read the paper,
and make sure that they're not doing anything obviously stupid, but I
know that before it appears in Physics Review Letters, it's gone
through a series of peer reviews, from within the W mass working
group, to the D0 collaboration, and finally to independent reviewers
appointed by the journal.
In this respect the medical field is no different from high energy
physics, and in some ways is even more vulnerable to abuse. Let's
say a pharmaceutical company wants to market a new product, and then
submits a paper to this e-journal supporting its wonderful new drug.
Suppose insufficient testing has been conducted, and there are nasty
side effects. People read about this wonderful product, and demand
that their doctors prescribe it. Pressure is put on the FDA to approve
it. Two years down the line, people start having liver damage. Is
this a completely unlikely scenario? We have already seen in recent
years how popular products like fen-fen have had to be removed from
the market due to dangerous side effects.
According to an article on Nando news:
> The proposed "E-biomed" site would have two archives.
>
> One would accept just about anything. Submissions would be ruled out
> only if two reviewers found them "extraneous or outrageous."
>
> The other archive would include only papers that have been accepted
> for publication by journals, but would post them immediately upon
> acceptance.
While this sounds like some form of peer review is being offered, the
first category will be little better than having no reviewing at all.
Considering the number of articles that will no doubt be submitted, are
just two reviewers going to be able to do anything more than give
an article a very cursory look-over?
Medical professionals will avoid the first site like the plague. The
people who are going to use it will be those who are most at risk -
the average person who has little or no medical knowledge, and cannot
judge the quality of the research published.
As for the quote: "Were all books going to be authoritative and
accurate? Were some dangerous to society? We can imagine priests
saying, "Mass printing and wide dissemination of books is O.K. so
long as we insure that every book is approved by a priest review
process." This is a completely spurious analogy. This is not a
case of censorship - if someone wants to publish their research
they can always create their own journal. Not cheap, but not
impossible. Alternative means of publication exist - yes, there's
even the web!
Peer review is not perfect, and every year there are cases of fraud
and shoddy research. Who can forget the case of the Nobel laureate
Dr. Baltimore? And while some innovative research is hampered by
the long process of peer review, it's not like there are no other
avenues of disseminating this information. More and more journals
are going on-line these days, so accessibility is not an issue. What
is an issue is the trustworthiness of the data.
We have to consider who will make use of these sites, and how this
information will be used. I believe that a peer reviewed journal,
despite the several months delay between submission and publication,
has a lot more to offer than masses of unsubstantiated junk. The web
has become a repository of misinformation and disinformation. These
days it is becoming more and more difficult to separate the chaff from
the wheat. When this trend spreads to medical information, which can
be of a life threatening nature, we need to pause and consider all the
consequences.
As a side note, I have read discussion here as to how archival of this
information is difficult. This is not the case, and not relevant to
the issue. Standard formats have been around for quite a while, such
as postscript and PDF. Many institutions and journals have made their
documents electronically available, just look at SLAC spires
(http://www-slac.slac.stanford.edu/find/spires.
server (http://weblib.cern.ch/cgi-bin/mkpage.pp?/all) to name a few.
Re: Dr. Baltimore? (Score:1)
associate Imanishi-Kari were accused of falsifying data that was
published in an 1986 article in the journal Cell. The case came to a
head in 1995, going to the highest levels of the NIH. Eventually, in
a very political decision, Baltimore was cleared of fraud, though
prior decisions had found Imanishi-Kari guilty of wrongdoing. Despite
the fact that almost every scientist who has looked at the data
concluded that fraud and scientific misconduct was involved, the law
panel decided that this evidence was irrelevant. O'Toole, the grad
student of Imanishi-Kari who first blew the whistle by publicly
questioning the data, had her career ruined. Baltimore was pressured to
resign his post as president of Rockefeller University, and
Imanishi-Kari lost her tenure-track position at Tufts. After they were
exonerated, Baltimore became president of Cal Tech, and Imanishi-Kari
was promoted to associate professor. This case still has a lot of
people upset with the ruling.
Does the audience at large read threads? (Score:1)
The problem is that often folks don't read that ensuing discussion. With increased usage of the Web, noise levels have risen dramatically. People have begun to be conditioned to skipping any sort of free, unmoderated discussion.
That's incredibly dangerous with regards to medical research. I know all sorts of people will react to this opinion, writing it off as a knee-jerk response to openness of information. But this information is difficult to compare to other information. The cost of trusting inaccurate medical research is too high to not review it before publishing it.
I'm not saying I'm against the electronic publication of medical research. Just that the idea does need to be carefully implemented. And that previous models should be considered with huge grains of salt.
The largest task will be determining what is and what is not noise. Allow too little and you have a restrained forum which poses its own danger. Allow too much and noise reduces readership of threads.
Rosalind Franklin was her name (Score:1)
Supposedly (I have not verified this myself), Watson refers to Rosalind Franklin as "Rosie" in his famed book "The Double Helix". It was a nickname she hated.
Shaking up the medical research community (Score:1)
I can imagine that there's going to be a certain amount of FUD associated with any change in the status quo, especially for an industry as entrenched as this, but maybe it's about time to shake up the peer review system. I'm sure that there would be a certain amount of lagtime between an article getting published in, let's say, JAMA and that same article appearing on the e-biomed archive, and that lagtime should be enough to keep serious medical researchers from dumping their journal subscriptions (which they probably don't pay for out of their own pockets anyway). Don't get me wrong, peer review serves the the valuable purpose of keeping the medical archives free of the sort of uninformed rambling that the internet is so good at producing - but that's the whole point of archiving information in the first place.
And on the other hand, the peer review process is basically an antiquated institution. It assumes that the participants are all objective scientists in white ivory towers, who can be trusted to keep political issues and personal vendettas out of their medical opinions, and we all know that isn't always the case. Perhaps public opinion could function as a sort of reality check on the peer review system, especially considering that 90% of the public would be getting this information from secondary sources (i.e. news media reporting on e-biomed, as opposed to people visiting e-biomed themselves).
Just as a brief example, take a look at the medical marijuana debate. The government has been sticking its dirty little paws in to the "objective" research on marijuana for years, and they've been having a pretty easy time twisting the research into any shape they desire; perhaps if this information were more publicly available, it would be harder for advocates to politicize the research.
In any event, the important thing is to preserve the checks that the medical community already has on the peer review process that ensure its impartiality. As long as that is secure, it's hard for me to believe that the medical journals' subscription revenue outweighs the public's access to medical research. Just my two cents worth...
Everything in the world needs to be FREE! (Score:1)
Death to the United States and its stupid capitalistic, and democratic society - the land of the free is actually the 'land of the enslaved'
First you need an appropriate screen (Score:2)
Also, the whole idea is not a threat to the existence of journals. It *is* a threat to expensive paper-based journals. There is no reason for these to exist any more, rather than converting to electronic distribution for printing at their end-destination.
Re:Why replace the screen? (Score:2)
I'm not denying that the text *can* be read on current screens. The problem is clarity/resolution/flicker. It's just plain harder on the eyes than paper, it isn't a substitute.
I even end up printing out source code so that I can find things--and this is with an excellent monitor.
For a quick reference, a screen can be useful. For regular reading, it just doesn't cut it.
Give your eyes a few years (Score:2)
Re:Just nuke the journals? Maybe not. (Score:2)
The archive issue is a real one. One of the biggest problems in scientific publishing right now (and the reason that Highwire was started here at Stanford) is that it's getting too damn expensive for libraries to subscribe to all these journals -- not just the subscription costs, but also the storage costs, etc. So the solution of simply continuing to publish paper journals isn't necessarily the best one. More and more stuff gets published every year, and there just isn't enough money to support the entire print publication cycle -- even the cost of paper is a huge issue.
Tapes degrade over time, as do CDs and other current electronic media, so even these aren't long-term solutions. I know of groups (dunno how much more I can say
IMHO, the main feature of journals that deserves to survive is the peer review process. I'm very interested by the rise of eprint servers in physics and now in biomedicine; it'll be really interesting to see how it ends up happening.
Anyway, here's some articles from the British Medical Journal which discuss this further, for one view from journals:
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/318/7186/75
Later,
Adam
Jon, did you notice... (Score:2)
I say go for it Doc V., there are legions out here that can and will review the material. Build your own Biodot website and the readers, reviewers, skeptics, cynics, those that are actually qualified to criticise, along with those that are naive enough to make enlightened suggestions will come.
Another libertarian heard from. (Score:2)
Don't get me wrong - I believe in intellectual property, I even believe license writers should be allowed to enforce any and every wacky fascist provision they can sucker a customer into agreeing to - but those are cases based on mutual agreement. If you don't like a software license, don't buy the software. If you think Hollywood is ripping you off with $7 movies, don't buy a ticket. If you're pissed that you can't photocopy or web publish a copyrighted book, write your own content. And if you distribute warez, whether it's commercial software or an mpeg of The Matrix, you are basically distributing stolen property.
I'm much less concerned about the morality of republishing a TV broadcast. There's no agreement, stated or implicit, made by someone whose only activity was to intercept radio waves streaming through their own homes and save a copy of the data. There is an exchange which occurs with every other distribution of copyrighted data (hell, even with cable & encrypted satellite broadcasts technically); an exchange that just doesn't occur with broadcast media. If WB wants to retain control over their TV programs, they should have asked us before sending those programs to millions of households.
Unfortunate parallel? (Score:2)
There will be struggles as the medical and scientific communities try to come to terms with a change as large as the dissemination of information electronically (rather than in paper-based journals), but this change will happen despite the FUD of the establishment.
Unfortunately, despite some superficial similarities, drawing a parallel between Dr. Varnus and 'Buffy' may only trivialize what is likely a significant advancement in communication of biological/medical information.
YS
Re:What Is It With Buffy? (Score:2)
I really don't care too much about Buffy The Vampire Slayer. I've watched the show every now and then if I happen to catch it on TV and there's nothing else decent on. I don't follow the storyline and I don't consider myself a fan.
However, as soon as I heard that there was an episode that was deemed unsuitable for air in the United States yet was aired in Canada at that time, I really knew I wanted to see it. Why?
Because I wanted to see for myself exactly what was so bad about this episode that the WB felt necessary to keep it from American eyes.
Because I wanted to see for myself.
To me, it's not about wanting to see how Buffy and her pals turn out. It's not about feeling upset because I can't see my favorite TV show. It's about being able to view, for myself, the episode in question, and make a decision as to whether or not the material I saw was objectionable. The fact that it was shown in Canada at the appropriate time also furthers my desire to want to be able to judge for myself -- if those in Canada could, why not me?
And besides, what of those who live near the border and can pick up Canadian television?
I guess it's a personal first for me -- to be denied the ability to view or experience something because I'm American. Still doesn't keep me from seeking out the mechanisms already in place to view what has been denied me.
*shrug*
Didn't care too much for the episode once I viewed it, anyhoo.
E-biomed is a great idea (Score:2)
Cost: Libraries have complained for many years about the rising costs of print subscriptions. Many have been forced to reduce the number of journals they subscribe to, all the while the number of journals being published has actually risen. Reasons for rising costs are many, but one chief contributor is the pressure on scientists to publish more - publish or perish is the key word. As a consequence, research results are being broken down into 'least publishable units' and pushed out into papers.
E-publishing in the E-biomed sense, while not necessarily curbing the proliferation of published papers, will at least significantly cut the cost of publishing and accessing papers.
There is also a growing amount of data that cannot be easily published in paper form, nor does it fit established scientific databases such as Genbank. E-publishing lets us put this stuff out there and make accessible to anybody who wants it.
Copyyright: It has long irked me and many scientists I know that many publishers require me to sign a copyright transfer agreement which robs me of most rights to my own output. If I decide to reuse a figure in an overview article, I actually have to go and ask permission to do so. Granted, I ususally do get that permission, but it bugs me to no end that I have to jump through such hoops just so that I can get into a first tier journal. It was my creativity, planning, execution and insight that enabled the publication in the first place. The publisher's contribution, while not negligible, is relativeley minor. E-publishing, if done right, will let me retain copyright of all my works.
Peer review: As many other contributors to this discussion have pointed out, peer review guarantees quality of content. However, science being an endeavor of humans, peer review is fraught with perils. It is mostly an old-boy network and hence new people, new ideas, unorthodox approaches and new interpretations of old data have a very hard time getting past the reviewers. By its very nature peer review resists change. Furthermore, because 'peers' are also mostly competitors, and because the review process is confidential, the system invites fraud on the part of the reviewers. Be that stealing ideas or simply slamming a paper in order to slow down the authors, it is not in the spirit of furthering science, but definitely occurs quite often.
Now contrast peer review with the experience we have been able to gather with the pysics eprint archive. Eprints are not reviewed formally, but despite this the eprint archive is highly regarded in the field and is probably the most widely used dissemination vehicle. Why? The wide readership and instant feedback that is enabled by the system essentially guarantees that authors are very careful to not make fools of themselves. This is not an oligarchy of the establishment as in peer review, but rather democracy in action. I'll take that anyday over peer review.
Christoph Weber
Re:Information/Open Source Biomed (Score:2)
And as far as fraud goes, anything published in an open community is much more likely to be spotted as fraudulent (sp?) than in a closed community.
Let a thousand flowers bloom.
Whom do you trust? (Score:3)
The E-biomed flap is highlighting a lack in U.S. (at least) society's educational/social system. We try to teach our children all manner of facts and algorithms, but I've never seen (short of college) an explicit attempt to teach the need to evaluate information, and more importantly the methods for such evaluation. As the state of the nation demonstrates, we desperately need such.
The rise of the Internet has only exacerbated a pre-existing problem, as the existance of sleazy politicians, Ponzi schemes, and homeopathic medicine amply demonstrate. Until we get up off our arses and start looking into the information we receive and the biases of those supplying it, we will be putty in the hands of scum.
But, we can't check everything ourselves, we must delegate some of the examination to others, and the question we're missing is: ``How do we evaluate the trustworthiness of an informant?''
Such an evaluation is a case of diminishing recursion: Those we already trust can point us to informants they trust, but if we're wise we invest less trust the further the chain extends. But whom do we trust de novo? I claim that the only way to develop trust is through memory of previous information that has been checked afterward.
Did ``trickle-down'' economics work? Ask yourself how your situation changed during the Reagan-Bush years, then apply what you've learned to the trustworthiness rating of those supporting it. Does /. supply unerring information? Check up on the items you're interested in and adjust your trust accordingly. Without the effort to remember and evaluate, we're no better than animated bags of prejudice.
Now, down to cases: Why do I trust the New York Times reporting more than that of the National Enquirer? Because they've been proven to be full of malarkey less often. (Too frequently, but still less often.) Why do I trust the Merck Manual more than the local herbalist's gazette? Because the Merck tries to base itself on replicable data instead of anecdote. Does that mean one's gospel and the other's fish-wrapping? No---trust is not a binary value. It runs the gamut from nearly zero (but, if a fool says the Sun rises in the East, it's no less true) to almost complete (but even I'm fallible).
We need to start teaching trust evaluation. One of the major problems in this day and age is the value placed on quick information. Evaluation and verification takes time, and information immediately available is inherently less trustworthy---something many on /. ignore. For most information, speed is not of the essence, accuracy is. The only way we can trust speedy information is if we trust the informant, and in e-info, the informant is all too often someone we've never heard of. If Alan Cox reports a kernel bug that can wipe my hard drive, I'll act on it a lot faster than if it comes from a /. AC.
But, trust also has subject limits. I'll listen respectfully to Mr. Cox on the kernel, programming, etc., but when it comes to investment information or medical treatments he's just another tyro until I've evaluated his abilities in those fields.
[This is one reason I'm happy that we have accounts available on /.---I certainly don't know who really signed up for the LTorvalds account (if such exists), but if an account holder is reasonably careful with the password, I can trust that the DonkPunch I heard from last week is the one posting today, and can apply the trust rating I previously developed for that poster to the current post.]
Thus, information evaluation is based on how long the info's been available for evaluation, and the track record of those who've evaluated it (if I'm unable to do so personally). Teach that to society, and we'll all live better (except for the scoundrels out there).
As for Dr. Varmus, it indeed sounds as if he's got his head screwed on straight. He's setting up a system where information is explicitly separated by speed of availability and depth of examination---take whichever you like, but remember to apply the appropriate assessment based on where you got it.
As people begin to pay more attention to reliability of information, we'll see more such web sites develop---they may not have the rumors that came through in the last 30 seconds, but they'll be the places you go when it really matters.
Just nuke the journals? Maybe not. (Score:3)
Leaving aside the difficulty of keeping exabytes of data accessible, computers are always in a state of flux, up to and including file formats. Opening a document that was created even two years ago can be an adventure -- imagine what that will be like in a century. We have options, of course: we could take documents over a certain age off-line, and resign ourselves to dealing with a certain format for decades to come. The latter is a lousy choice (from experience); and the former negates all the benefits that Katz is praising.
Printing them on paper solves a lot of these problems. (For most people, journals are freely accessible, if not convenient: it's just a matter of finding the closest university library.) The ideal case would be that E-biomed also published its articles in journal form, or that everything that went to E-biomed was also published elsewhere. The problem is that journals are very, very expensive to publish. They're not high profile enough to attract good advertising budgets, and the subscription charges are already too high. Most bio journals already charge the author a massive per page cost to have the article published. If subscriptions to these journals end, then I don't know where they could make up the revenue.
E-biomed is good, but we can't simply let the journals vanish. They do fill a role. If freely accessible information is good, then information freely accessible for centuries is better. For a change, let's try to plan this move all the way through.
Public education. (Score:3)
There is a broad public perception that newer == better. And that if it's the latest research, it must be the best. I worry that people in desperate (or not so desperate) medical need will read preliminary results, or mis-interpret the conclusions, and immediately act on that (mis)information as if it were the best treatment. So far the general public has shown an alarming lack of understanding of even the basic conceptual framework on which most of this research is based.
Does anybody remember the run on shark cartilage capsules and additives after preliminary info showed that sharks seldom got cancer. (Even though there was no evidence that ingesting the stuff was at all helpful, and there was lots of reason to believe it wasn't.) There are also plenty of cases of patients demanding antibiotics of their physicians when they're suffering from viral infections, thereby not treating the real illness while at the same time providing a perfect breeding ground for drug resistant bacterial strains like the drug resistant TB strains croping up all over.
Maybe the long term answer is to educate the public in research practices and critical thinking, as well as improve science education in general, but I fear that the short term result will be bad decisions, and litigation arising from those bad decisions which will hamper research rather than help.
Information (Score:3)
Several Points (Rene S. Hollan as AC) (Score:5)
After all, the Buffy episode in question was to be the second part of a two part program IIRC. Yanking it could be construed as fraud.
That aside, as a libertarian I believe that the producers generally DO have the right to restrict distribution of what they produce and defend against those that would "steal" same to distribute under their terms. But, they have to bear the costs of such defense. When they pull a bonehead move, and anger enough people, the fact that some will no longer respect their property rights and attempt to steal from them should come as no surprise.
Bottom line: do something stupid and your defense costs go up. With the net, they can go WAAAY UP, to the point of not making it economical to mount a defense.
Governments are supposed to restrain such "mob rule", of course, but all too often the cure is worse than the risk of disease. Ultimately, the founding fathers of the U.S. believed that a focused "mob" was safer than an all-powerful government, hence the right to bear arms so as to facilitate the overthrow of same, in extremis.
Because I'm a libertarian, I have to deal with issues such as "What if someone got to own most of the water, or air? Should we respect their property rights, lay down, and die?" Morally, yes, if they didn't lie and steal to get all of such an important resource -- we're to blame for not collecting our own as well. Of course, many wouldn't see it that way, and mount an attack, which the "air-owner" couldn't resist. Again, the cost of defense when you tick people off limits just how much you can tick them off to make it worthwhile.
The net has lowered the bar where it becomes impractical to get others annoyed. I see this as a good thing.
Second: whenever change is afoot, there will be those, who, benefiting from the status quo, will seek to oppose it (Machiavelli, "The Prince").
Some profit from hoarding what they know. Others wish to share. Those others now have a relatively cheap distribution channel. They WILL be opposed by the former, lest their knowledge be diluted in value. Look for greater attempts to control, and license, this distribution channel (the internet) all in the name of the "public interest", of course. Let's strive to keep it as diversified as possible, shall we?
In Liberty,
Rene S. Hollan